The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Matthew Lightner

Atera’s Matt Lightner knew early on he wanted to bring people together, but he didn’t always think it would be with his food. “I always joke that I wanted to have a dive bar when I was 6 years old,” remembering the type of no-frills saloons he went to with his family growing up in Missouri: “[They] were these divey places where you’d put your boots on and go to drink cheap beer—that was the culture. People would have a good time smoking their cigarettes and drinking their crappy beer, and I thought, Wow, people really like that. I wanted people to be happy.”

Dive-bar dreams may seem like an unlikely starting point for a chef now known for running one of NYC most ambitious modernist kitchens, but the more Lightner talks about the foods that excite him, the more it’s clear that the impulse to make people happy is at the heart of his cooking, under the layers of complex techniques and foraged ingredients. It’s the emotional thread that connects the “quail egg” at Atera (aioli and milk gel that’s formed in the shape of an egg and pickled, served as one of the pre-meal snacks) to the deviled eggs of a Midwest childhood.

Lightner stumbled into restaurant kitchens out of necessity, as a 14-year-old making a quick buck as a dishwasher, but it didn’t take long for him to realize he’d found his calling. “You know, when you do something and you’re good at it, when most people suck at it, you want to stick with it,” he says. “It was like, At least I don’t have to worry about anything else, I can just do this.”

He worked his way across the West Coast, eventually becoming chef de cuisine at L’Auberge in Southern California, before embarking on a program in Spain that involved an eating tour of the country followed by 18 months in the kitchen at Mugaritz, one of the high temples of minimalist gastronomy. If the high-powered regionalism of the West Coast wasn’t enough to put Lightner into full-fledged locavore territory, Spain sealed the deal. Much of the world’s share of Michelin stars belong to restaurants there that are housed in crumbling farmhouses, tucked between sheep’s’ meadows in towns with fewer inhabitants than a FiDi condo. They have their own kitchen gardens, or the local farmer who rides down every morning with the day’s leeks, primarily out of convenience. It’s a seductive naturalism that, coupled with the genre-pushing creativity of the region’s chefs, pushed all of Lightner’s buttons at once.

Today, the two-Michelin-starred Atera has done the best it can to echo the experience of sitting on the rolling hillside of the Basque country in the concrete wasteland of Tribeca, with a living wall of herbs dominating the dark room lined with reclaimed barn siding, and dishes presented on stones or nestled in moss. Though there’s no elderly farmer on a bicycle and Lightner rarely gets out into the forest to harvest his own wild herbs anymore—as he did often in Portland—the city’s Greenmarkets provide all of the local ingredients necessary to maintain that sense of connection to place. Lightner pays homage to a Spanish mentor with dishes like the beet ember, a single beet slow-roasted for hours and grilled until it looks like a lump of coal, and ups the ante with his own sleight-of-hand, like a “razor clam” that guests are invited to eat shell and all (turns out the shell is a baguette meticulously dyed with squid ink).

Here, Lightner shares the 10 dishes that made his career, from sandwiches with his dad’s ham to highlights from his Spanish sojourn, plus some of the creations that have helped put Atera on the haute-cuisine map.

1. Sandwiches

Sandwiches are pretty much their own food group when you work so much—if it wasn’t for sandwiches, I probably would have starved to death. Here [in the kitchen], it’s a very key item, in terms of convenience and nutrition—being able to eat quickly and fast.
Growing up, my dad sold hams for a living, so we always had white bread, mayonnaise, and ham sandwiches. Always. We could have had ham sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When I was young I used to be able to eat any kind of deli meat, but now I look for things that are nitrate-free, that have no added sugar—all-natural deli meats. That’s what I’m into right now. Good bread—it has to be a wholesome bread, like rye, whole wheat, or wheat crackers—lots of vegetables, mustard, and turkey or ham or roast beef. If you’re going to have Wonder Bread and processed ham, then you go for the yellow mustard—you don’t gourmet it up by putting Grey Poupon on it.

2. Deviled Eggs

I was into cooking when I was very young—the art of nurturing oneself, and the craft of entertainment. Coming from a traditional household with very traditional, simple food, deviled eggs were like a form of what people do in modern gastronomy: they make the aioli, they process it, they add flavors, they put it back together. My mom used to make them frequently, for Memorial Day, Labor Day, Fourth of July, things like that.
The other thing about deviled eggs is they’ve very soothing—heartwarming and delicious—and you can eat way too many of them than you probably ever should. There’s not many foods out there where you know there’s so much fat and mayonnaise in there, but all of sudden you just ate six whole eggs and there’s no shame.

3. Mole Negro

I got into the restaurant industry out of necessity, to make money when I was a teenager. I was only cooking basic stuff like hot turkey sandwiches, but when I was 17, I was working at a Southwestern restaurant and I started reading Rick Bayless’ Mexican Kitchen. I was so intrigued by how he could use all these different spices and things like chocolate and bananas to make savory sauces, so I made my first mole negro. It’s probably one of the most challenging recipes he has in the entire book, but it turned out pretty good. I didn’t have much knowledge of Mexican cuisine, I just did it. I probably looked at it as a challenge; I was pretty competitive.
It was a very revelatory thing—it’s a three-day process, it’s a lot of work, and I came to find out that I love the process a lot. That’s why a lot of the food I do now, you can’t just open up tomorrow [and serve it]; it take so much prep and production and planning.

4. Snacks, El Bulli (Spain)

Everyone in the world loves chips, they love sweets, they love all these different snacks. But for some reason Ferran Adrià was one of the very first guys to go, Well, I’m going to make an awesome snack that is going to make you rethink food, rethink cuisine, and I’m going to give it to you as the most enjoyable thing that you could possibly have. Before, you would go to a restaurant and they’d give you hors d’oeuvres, and it was like, Aw, really? Do I really have to eat that? [Adrià] completely changed the process of finger food. And he had no shame; he would make Bugles, he’d make chicken wings, he made all that kind of stuff—at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant. A standout one I had was a brioche that he steamed almost like a pork bun, then seared it and filled it with the best jamón I’ve ever had. It was the best goddamned ham sandwich in the world. I think that way of thinking changed the game throughout the world, not just the techniques he came up with.

5. Grilled Oyster and Seaweed, Asador Etxebarri (Spain)

The way that [chef Victor Arguinzoniz] got in the smoke flavor and the fresh seaweed… even though I was far away and hadn’t been home in a few months, it reminded me of being at home in the Midwest. It reminded me of fresh-mown grass and the smell of barbecues. For me, it was really important because it was a transcendent dish; it was a realization that you can [give people transcendent experiences] through food. Where I grew up we didn’t have oysters or seaweed, but for some reason that dish made me think of grilling hamburgers and hot dogs in my backyard. Food can do that on multiple levels.
I think we [strive for] that in everything that we try to do. We try to take away some of the ties that people have, that they attach to food, and make it more of a novelty, and have the flavors bring them back into their memories. The great thing is you don’t have to work on specific memories, because everyone has their own.

6. Idiazabal Cheese Gnocchi, Mugaritz (Spain)

When I was at Mugaritz I probably made a million of these things. I was even filmed making them, including once for No Reservations. Whenever they had press come in, I was always the one doing the gnocchi.
It was a funny and fun and impactful dish. It’s delicious, they use a very specific technique for it, and they use their local product when they make it. It’s probably one of their most famous dishes; it’s these little gnocchi that they make from a water created with idiazabal cheese and a starch called kudzu, served on the plate with a pork bouillon and fresh herbs. No one knew how to make these unless you actually went there.

7. Vegetable Charcoal, Mugaritz

Andoni Luis Aduriz was one of the very first people to look at things not just for what they are or what has already been done with them—he looked at them through a completely new lens. I take a lot of his influence into my food. He looks at things very creatively and very passionately, and that’s the way he can come up with dishes like the vegetable charcoal. What they do is they split open a yucca root, and it kind of looks like…it has all the ridges the way charcoal has. They cook it in a little bit of blue corn, black beans, and squid ink, and it starts to get this really dark color and it also starts to open up a bit, as if the charcoal’s cracking, like wood. They put it in the oven to let it dry out, and they add a bit of dried eggplant skin that looks like ash. They put it on the plate with broken egg yolks, which adds a textural element; the yucca has the texture of a potato, and there’s a very traditional combination in Basque cuisine of potato with egg yolks.

8. Wild Ginger Sundae, Castagna (Portland, OR)

When I moved back to Oregon, I wanted to rediscover local products and do something unique—I felt like everyone was doing the same thing. I’d had ginger ice cream before, but it was dark and harsh and spicy. I'd heard about this wild ginger, and when they brought it in, it was very soft; for lack of a better comparison it had a patchouli essence to it, very herbaceous, with very soft ginger notes to it. One of the things that makes me happy is a sundae. Not just the typical ones like chocolate or banana — sundaes just have a lot of stuff going on, with all these different textures and somewhat different temperatures. So what we ended up doing with the wild ginger was steep it in the ice cream base, then we candied some parsley root, so it was crunchy and chewy. We made meringue that had cardamom in it, and we made a spiced gingerbread. Then we would roll the whole sundae in all these different flowers and herbs. It became a very iconic dish that a lot of people talked about.

9. Barbecued Lamb Collar at Atera

One of the dishes that let me take a little bit of my childhood and put it into a restaurant is barbecued lamb collar. We’d get lamb necks in and we’d cook them really, really slow, ‘til they’re about to fall apart, and then we would baste them with a sweet and sour barbecue sauce. That’s something that my whole family, growing up around the Kansas city area, knows: that sweet Kansas City BBQ. And the lamb has this burnt crunch on it, like burnt ends. To be able to have that in a more modern restaurant is great.
I started doing it quite a few years ago, and we do it every once in a while at Atera. For the sauce, we take a bunch of different spices, a bit of beef stock, and tomatoes that we’ve preserved, smoked, then cooked down into our own paste. Then we grind mustard seeds and use a little bit of pickling liquid in there—it’s a bunch of things you wouldn’t expect to have at a place like Atera. The last time we did it we infused sassafras into a savory meringue that we kind of whipped up, then we smoked the meat over hickory and served it over hickory nuts.

10. Sliced Razor Clams, Sprouted Almonds, Pickled Garlic at Atera

What’s really interesting about this very simple dish is that it’s things that grow in all different aspects of nature but have a symbolic connection. At the time that we were getting these young, green almonds in, we were also pickling these little tiny garlics that had sprouts in them, and then we got these beautiful local razor clams in. I was slicing the razor clams, someone was slicing the garlic, and there was a connection in the way they looked. And when you look at the flavor profiles, they are a perfect accompaniment to each other. They just lay right on top of each other, and you kind of have to pick them out to see which is which.
It’s about having a more acute awareness of products and how they look and how they taste, then coming up with new and interesting combinations. We talk about being clever, and it was very clever to put these three things on a plate—they look identical. We think a lot about that when we think about food. It’s for the diner to discover as well. You don’t sit there and tell them, ‘Oh hey, look at this’; it’s an awakening for them, too. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t really be worth it.

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